


Lions and Tigers

by abbichicken



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alcohol, Animal Play, Comedy, Cute, Drinking Games, Drunkenness, Funny, M/M, Stupidity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-17
Updated: 2011-07-17
Packaged: 2017-10-21 12:06:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,265
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/224991
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/abbichicken/pseuds/abbichicken
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Erik has never played drinking games. Charles thinks this needs to be rectified, but before he can even set out the rules, they're already on their way to a mess of a night. Stupidity ensues.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lions and Tigers

"Oh no..." Raven says, as Charles collects all the shot glasses up from the cabinet in the living room. "You're not..."

"Yep!" Charles says, brightly, clinking his way back out again, "Drinking chess! All my idea! Erik's never played drinking games, would you believe..."

"I don't feel I should be the one that has to tell you it's not a good idea!" she calls after him, despairing immediately. Last time Charles and a 'friend' deciding to play drinking games here, it ended up with Charles trying to get her to transform into various figures from history, whilst his new acquaintance passed out upside down, and only mostly in the bath. An obscure, but exhausting evening, and something in her worries that Erik doesn't have the patience for a horribly drunk Charles, who is exceptionally demanding, and less than half as funny as he thinks he is.

Returning to the study, Charles fills shot glasses with vodka, neat and firelight-warm. Erik watches him, thin smile playing at the corners of his lips.

"Set the board up, then?" Charles asks, frowning when the bottle runs out at just 28 shots of his prospective 32. "Shit, that won't do..."

"Charles, we don't need a shot for every single piece...I think you might be over-reaching, here..."

"Have you ever played before?"

"Well, no. Not with childish forfeits, anyway."

"Childish _what_? Drinking, Erik, vodka, not suitable for the under-fives, come now, don't be silly. Would you like me to mix you a Martini to help you relax?"

"I would, but you've used all the vodka in this setup."

"With gin, then."

"No, thank you. Gin has the traditional effect on me."

"Turns you into a sullen housewife, obsessed with the stains on the worktops? Erik, I don't mean to be unkind, but I think you're already halfway there..."

"Stop it, goodness, you're really not selling yourself as my ideal person to drink myself into oblivion with...give me one of those..."

"Games! Games and fun!" Charles says, at a slightly unexpected volume.

Erik rubs at his eyes, half-hoping Charles will transform into someone quieter, half still very glad to be here. "Have you been at the cabinet already?"

Charles looks sideways, juuust a little too manic. "Maybe?"

"Oh, god."

Erik takes a shot and inhales it, gladly appreciating the way the liquid grates at his dry throat.

"Maybe we should just skip the chess," he mutters, envisaging a night in which he finishes all of these, and sinks into blissful darkness which is never spoiled by Sean and Alex "practicing", nor by Raven's disquieting desire to sleep with him (three nights in a row she's turned up at his room - he's been wondering if he should just engineer things so that tonight he's fucking her 'brother' when she barges her way in...then again, knowing her as he feels he does already, she'd probably still want to jump in...)... ...

"Hello! Hello! Earth to Erik! Do I have to push my way into your mind to see what it is that's causing you to ignore me so very rudely, when all I'm trying to do is entertain you?"

Erik throws back a second shot. "No, no don't do that..."

"Ooo, I do believe you're blushing. Was I there? Was I naked?"

Erik looks suspiciously at the table, and notices that there are rather more empty glasses than there were a few minutes ago.

"Charles, I think you've misunderstood the rules of your _own game_?"

The truth is, Erik has been making Charles really quite nervous for some time now. He seems too good to be true - well, if you discount the murderous vengeful streak, but if Charles is honest, he's quite attracted to that, actually - and they've spent their every waking moment together for weeks on end. It's all a bit much. And, when it's all got a bit much in life, Charles has always turned to the bottle, which has always served him well.

"Never mind!" Charles says, grabbing another. "Skål!"

"Your very good health," Erik replies, taking up his third, clinking tiny heavyweight glasses with Charles, and gulping it down. Already, accustomed as he's become to the taste, the alcohol has lost its warmth, and its bite.

"I'm not really in the mood for chess now, because you're being very rude and distracting, but it's a shame not to have any games at all," Charles muses, pacing around the room looking for something else to occupy his fanciful mind.  
______

"You're not the one with the power of flight!" Erik observes, all grave concern, as Charles, having just informed him that he's going to fly across to the bar a couple of miles down the road and pick up another bottle, because, really, they've already had five shots each (plus whatever Charles imbibed before this started) and it's not affecting them at all, so they're definitely going to need more, advances towards the open window.

"Hmm, interesting. I'm not, am I?" Charles looks as if he's trying to remember something. "Maybe I just haven't tried hard enough! Give me a push..."

"Don't tempt me," Erik says, turning Charles around and directing him back to the chair, distracting him by making the loose change in Charles' pocket dance around so that it alarms, then delights him.

"You're doing that! That's very funny, Erik, very clever. You're a very clever man, did you know that?"

Erik raises an eyebrow. "Perhaps."

"Have another drink!"  
______

"Lions and Tigers!" Charles announces, looking proud like that was the answer to a very difficult question.

"Where?" Erik says, looking around in a genuine concern that there might be some mutants with the powers of big cats, because, these things happen.

Charles covers his hand with his mouth as he giggles, regressing, rather. "Silly Erik! It's a game! Nanny taught me to play it..."

"Nanny," Erik groans, sinking as far into the chair as the chair will allow, which simply isn't far enough. "Right."

"It's like this," Charles says, descending into a heap on the floor. "One of us is a lion, and the other one is the...other thing..."

He crawls around, muttering incomprehensibly, something about the savannah, and something else about chasing, punctuated by unco-ordinated leaps at things like table legs, and, eventually, Erik's shoes.

Erik looks down at him with an expression that could, in modern parlance, only be described as _not sure if want?_

"Where does the drinking come into this one?" he asks, with mild concern.

"Hmm. Probably now."

"Oh good."

Shot seven goes down like little more than water.  
______

"...and his...head..." Erik can barely speak for giggling, as shot eight rapidly finds its way into his bloodstream, "his head exploded like a _melon_...it was _hilarious_ , Charles, hilarious...and then this dog turns up...and...and..."

Charles stares, ashen, at Erik, trying at once to picture and not-picture the extensively gory and unpleasant scene that Erik is describing, as if it were that thing that happened to a friend of a friend that _you had to be there, but I'll tell you anyway_...

Erik continues to laugh to himself, choking slightly on the ninth shot, wiping his eyes. "Oh, I guess you had to be there," he says, looking over to Charles, and cracking up all over again. "Your _face_!"

Charles nods, and is, for the first time in a while, defeated by words, and Erik.  
_______

After shot nine, Charles has picked himself up and is on one of his own very funny stories from his school days, which Erik doesn't understand at all. It's something to do with biscuits, which Erik isn't fond of anyway, and then a great long string of euphemisms, which, whilst charming, aren't conducive to understanding.

He nods and smiles, and focuses on the way Charles is so red in the face, and the way he can't quite make eye contact because he's talking about, apparently, possibly, _naughty things_. Very endearing.

Almost...pretty, he thinks, and finds himself colouring at having formed that thought.

"Is this a game you played at Oxford?" he asks Charles, trying to take an interest and distract himself.

Charles clears his throat. "No, no. Er, no. No, at Oxford, we played Nietzsche and Wittgenstein..."

Erik's face takes on an expression of wide-eyed confusion.

"Oh," Charles says, waving a hand as if trying to delete his words. "No, you probably don't need to know abut that game. Never mind. Forget that? Forget that."

Erik nods, and thinks that's for the best, although it was worth it to see Charles complete his personal rainbow of colours by turning purple.

Shot ten is like anaesthetic for the brain.  
________

Raven looks in on them between shots eleven and twelve, because there was one hell of a crash, and some kind of broken glass-sounds, and she was genuinely concerned, because if she's wanted to throw Charles out of a window when he's hammered, she's fairly sure that someone like Erik might actually do it.

She finds the pair of them lying on the floor amidst the ruins of a lamp that Erik appears to have dismantled from a distance, with Charles laughing as the poker, toasting fork and fire shovel dance merrily around them. "It's like jugs...juggling...like juggling, do the chairs as well...oh look! Look it's Raven! Hello, Raven!"

"I'm very disappointed in you, Charles," Raven says, in a way that she can't deny she's always wanted to. "I expected better of you."

Charles' laugh is more of a cackle, and Erik, losing his concentration and dropping the household items he was making dance around so entertainingly, joins in.

"And you, for that matter," Raven says, looking pointedly at Erik, who then goes very quiet and looks so much like little-boy-caught-out that it's all she can do not to lose her stern face, and then all she can do not to run to find Charles' camera.

"Can I trust you to behave?" she continues, seeing that there is _something_ here that should probably be allowed to evolve, and understanding that she can get all the revenge she likes in the morning, perhaps by helping Sean practice his scream, just after sunrise.

"Can you do Abraham Lincoln?" Charles asks, biting his tongue.

Erik and Charles look at each other, and collapse in mild hysteria.

Raven rolls her eyes and leaves, smiling more than she means to. It's a long time since she's seen Charles look so out-and-out _happy_. Strange as these times are, it doesn't mean she isn't happy for him, too. And besides, she's got Hank, downstairs, to go and...work on. From what she just saw, perhaps the reason she isn't getting anywhere with Erik is, after all, not so much to do with her as she'd thought..."

Back in the study, Erik is trying to say to Charles "We got in trouble!" but he's laughing so much it _hurts_ ; he can't remember ever thinking that the world could be this much fun. Except that time with the iron filings, oh that was a good time...he tries to explain it to Charles, and Charles goes back to that funny green colour he was a bit before, and looks nervous, which makes Erik laugh all the more...  
_____

It's lucky neither of them will remember their first kiss, admittedly not the thing that either of them had ever given all that much thought to - both having skipped to the end, fantasy-wise - but still, it's definitely not the kind of memory any early relationship needs. It comes after shot thirteen, and is misjudged, all clashing teeth and awkward hands that pull hair a bit too much and want to dive under clothes but can't find the way in.

It's wet, and amusing, lasts for an age and angles them this way and then that, never quite comfortably slumped, and ends up with Charles breaking away to collect shot fourteen for them both, certain that this is the one for the road, as it were.

They drink, in crumpled, combined, contented silence.

"Uhzr?" Charles asks Erik, as he lets the empty glass roll across the rug, to rest on one bit of devastation or the other.

"Mhzh," Erik agrees, wrapping an arm around Charles' neck and falling asleep.  
______

Erik wakes first, a crick in his back, left arm completely dead, and a viciously strong need to vomit demanding his very immediate attention.

He disentangles a surprisingly warm and pliable Charles from his body with considerable difficulty, and belts along the corridor to the bathroom.

It's only as his body lets him know that he's about done with retching into porcelain that he begins to feel the terrible, terrible state of his hangover. Splashing cold water over his face and sleeking his hair, discarding his shirt (torn down one side; even through the haze of the worst hangover - the only hangover? - he's ever had, he still notices this, but doesn't have the wherewithall to remember how it happened), he stares through unfocused eyes at the hell of a reflection looking back at him in the bathroom mirror.

It's barely morning. He does not need to be upright.

He returns to the scene of the crime, a wave of minor devastation, all utterly inconsequential at this moment in time, as long as he can lie down, thanks, and literally crawls back to Charles.

"Oh!" Charles offers, waking up just slightly. "Lion?"

"Yeah," says Erik, settling down again on the floor, "lion." He catches Charles' left leg beneath his right, and, so entwined, drifts off somewhere between unconsciousness and sleep.


End file.
